Weekend tech reading: GTX 690 unveiled, and why is Ivy Bridge so hot?

Matthew DeCarlo

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Nvidia unveils GeForce GTX 690: Dual GK104 flagship launching May 3rd As we mentioned back on Monday, Nvidia was going to be making some kind of GeForce announcement this evening at the Nvida Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China. Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has just finished his speech, announcing Nvidia’s next ultra-premium video card, the GeForce GTX 690. Launching later this week, the GeForce GTX 690 will be Nvidia’s new dual-GPU flagship... AnandTech

Why is Ivy Bridge so hot and bothered? If you read our Ivy Bridge coverage carefully, you'll know that we observed some rather high temperatures when overclocking the Core i7-3770K. With a single-fan air tower, our chip ran at a reasonable 50-60°C when clocked to 4.4-4.5GHz at its default voltage. However, when we pushed to 4.9GHz on 1.35V, the temperature soared past 100°C. Other reviews have observed similarly scorching temperatures, so it's not just our sample. Tech Report

Get rich U. Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. The New Yorker

Texas, Amazon agree on sales taxes, says statement from Combs’ office Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Susan Combs and Amazon.com, Inc. today announced an agreement that will lead to the creation of thousands of new jobs in Texas by the online retailer. According to the agreement between the Comptroller of Public Accounts and Amazon, the Company plans over the next four years to create at least 2,500 jobs and make at least $200 million in capital investments in the state... Chron.com

Brilliant: Players waging actual war on EVE’s economy I’m not an EVE player. I know it sucks in some people like a massively multiplayer black hole, but the actual act of playing it has never exerted much of a gravitational pull on my attention. I’m probably dumb. Regardless, though, I can’t help but admire the sheer insanity this place constantly generates. Years-in-the-making corporate conspiracies, thousands-strong space battles, the very existence of Dust 514 -- it is, at times, nearly unbelievable. RPS

Steve Wozniak: Why I love my Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Our Dan Patterson, Todd Moore and Gina Smith caught up with Gina’s coauthor and friend Steve Wozniak, who invented Apple technology and co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs. It’s noisy in there -- but this podcast is a fun conversation with Wozniak over why he thinks the Windows Phone 7 UI is just the bee’s knees. He shows us that he carried two iPhones, a Droid Razr and, to our surprise at the time, a Nokia Lumia. aNewDomain

A history of Mozilla browsers design Writing the piece on FOSS design, it made me think about past experiences in various communities and brought back memories to the point when I decided to put down some thoughts on Mozilla browsers (won't cover other apps today) design history as I saw it, both as an user and from my involvement with its community. Even if the screenshots below are taken mostly from Wikipedia (try to run 10-15 years old binaries on a current Linux desktop)... Nicu Buculei

FCC: TV stations must post rates for campaign ads The FCC voted Friday to require broadcast TV stations to post online the advertising rates they charge political candidates and advocacy groups. The vote came despite strong opposition from many broadcasters, who have argued that making sensitive advertising rate information so publically available will undermine stations' competitiveness and give advertisers unfair leverage over how much they are willing to pay. Phys.org

At 92, a bandit to Hollywood but a hero to soldiers One of the world’s most prolific bootleggers of Hollywood DVDs loves his morning farina. He has spent eight years churning out hundreds of thousands of copies of "The Hangover," "Gran Torino" and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas. "Big Hy" -- his handle among many loyal customers -- would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. The NY Times

Get him to the geek The underground double bus on Boston's silver line is filled to capacity with an unusually homogeneous crowd this morning. Mostly male, mostly twenty-something, mostly white, mostly dressed in slouchy windbreakers, cargo pants, and baggy jeans. Their T-shirts mostly depict pixelated cartoons and mushrooms, and esoteric catchphrases. It's the uniform of a certain social subset, the kind of attire that suggests acne where there is none. GQ

How Apple sidesteps billions in taxes Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby. Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states. The NY TImes

Is GPL licensing in decline? A debate has raged for months about open source licensing trends. It all started with assertions that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is rapidly falling from favor as an open source license, replaced largely by the Apache License. Free software advocates couldn't disagree more. What's really going on? To understand the answer, you need to know a little background. InfoWorld

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Translation: A bunch of *****s suicide low cost ships into anyone stupid enough to be in a high-cost ship while this is happening.
 
The GTX 690 is a damn sexy card for a reference design.
Still way overpriced at $999 for downclocked GTX 680 SLI. For that price I'd expect 4GB of VRAM per GPU and the same clock (and clock potential) of the single cards*. I'd guess that the 1k pricetag is all about maximizing the marketing potential via tech site reviews without having to worry about producing many cards for the retail channel.

* Talking of which, multiple sources are listing specifications of the two unreleased Kepler cards of interest to the majority...as a realistic purchase - the GTX 670 and GTX 660 Ti

specif.png


[Sources: OBR , WCCF, Videocardz , and some bonus 690 content from TPU -snappy SLI bridge]
 
This card does look quite nice if it is just barely slower than 680 SLI. If that's the case and it had come out at the same time as the 680 then I probably would have considered this over the 680s just for future potential.
 
I think at one point I was considering a mobo/processor upgrade at Ivy Bridge. Not feeling up to it right now. Maybe next year.
 
Urgh... looks like this period of terrible performance/price ratio for GPUs is here to stay. No doubt AMD will price their 7990 around $899.
 
"However, when we pushed to 4.9GHz on 1.35V, the temperature soared past 100°C. (With a single-fan air tower)"

Isn't it funny that:
a) we can do this
b) we actually complain about it
 
+1 gwailo
I was thinking on similar lines. OC is for those want 'something extra' without having to spend 'more' anyway, so one can't find any fault with the manufacturer in this respect. Also, how can it be worthy of news? At best may be point of discussion on some OC boards/forums.
 
Christ, look at the stats on that card! I want. Imagine two in SLI... terrifying.
Glad to see theyre trying to mimmic two 680s instead of 660s.
 
+1 gwailo
I was thinking on similar lines. OC is for those want 'something extra' without having to spend 'more' anyway, so one can't find any fault with the manufacturer in this respect. Also, how can it be worthy of news? At best may be point of discussion on some OC boards/forums.
I've been thinking the whole time that Ivy doesn't have a temperature problem. There maybe thermal caps intentionally engineered by Intel but who can blame them. If you want a major performance boost from LGA1155 go with a LGA2011 and be done with it. If you can OC a processor great but don't complain about it if temperatures are a greater problem than the last generation.
 
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